Originally compiled on the orders of King Alfred the Great, approximately A.D. 890, and subsequently maintained and added to by generations of anonymous scribes. The original language was Anglo-Saxon (Old English), but these later entries are essentially Estuary English in tone. You could say, this is an EU "Withdrawalist, Libertarian and generally reactionary blog. Regular, but amateurish"(if often a tad infantile).

Friday, September 19, 2014

Feel free to copy, there is no copyright on an Anoneumouse montage.
(click on image to enlarge)

No to DevoMAX and repeal The Scotland Act 1998 as being unconstitutional.

The Union with Scotland Act 1706 is still valid constitutional legislation and Article IV remains unchanged.

Trade and Navigation and other Rights.

That all the Subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain shall from and after the Union have full freedom and Intercourse of Trade and Navigation to and from any port or place within the said United Kingdom and the Dominions and Plantations thereunto belonging And that there be a Communication of all other Rights Privileges and Advantages which do or may belong to the Subjects of either Kingdom except where it is otherwise expressly agreed in these Articles.

No to DevoMAX and repeal The
Scotland Act 1998 as being unconstitutional.

In 2002 (Thoburn v Sunderland City Council ("Metric Martyrs")
) Lord Justice Laws stated:-In the present state of its maturity the common
law has come to recognise that there exist rights which should properly be
classified as constitutional or fundamental.…….The special status of
constitutional statutes follows the special status of constitutional rights.
Examples are the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1689……Ordinary statutes may be
impliedly repealed. Constitutional statutes may not. For the repeal of a
constitutional Act or the abrogation of a fundamental right to be effected by
statute, the court would apply this test:….

3 Comments:

If Lord Justice Laws' ruling were to be upheld, then many of the effects of the European Communities Act 1972 would be null and void. The Act relied almost entirely on the doctrine of "implied repeal" of parts of earlier constitutional Acts and documents like the Bill of a Rights and all the way back to Magna Carta which, if Laws' ruling is correct, would require specific repeal.

My guess is that Laws' ingenious ad hoc creation of a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament would be overturned on appeal or in the Supreme Court, if ever anybody tried to put it to the test.

I have just read the short book " Ross was right" , the story of Ross Mc Whirter's legal and other challenges to the European Communities Act 1972.

The Labour Party had been negotiating Britain's entry to the EEC and Heath "picked up the cards" and carried on for the Conservatives.

Labour envisaged that a Bill of over 1,000 clauses would be necessary to bring the accession treaty into domestic legal force, overriding existing statutes. In the event, the Conservatives decided to rely on "implied repeal" and their Bill had only 13 clauses.

It was a massive piece of sleight of hand, particularly since no MPs, other than some government ministers, had an opportunity to read the treaty before voting on it. They signed a blank cheque by an 8 vote majority.